$723,151 Judgment Against Wichita Lumber Store After 150-Pound Flooring Roll Fell on Young Girl

On November 5, 1987, a six-year-old girl went shopping with her parents at Star Lumber & Supply in Wichita, Kansas. The family had come to look at Formica for a dining room table. Star Lumber stored its rolls of vinyl flooring by standing them on one end against a wall. One of those rolls, about six feet long and weighing roughly 150 pounds, fell over and struck the girl on the head, knocking her onto the cement floor.

She was unconscious or semiconscious, bleeding from her mouth, nose and ears, and vomiting blood when her mother picked her up. An ambulance took her to St. Francis Regional Medical Center, where doctors considered her condition life-threatening. Imaging found a frontal skull fracture, a temporal skull fracture, a basilar skull fracture, a fractured cheekbone arch and a perforated right eardrum. She spent two days in pediatric intensive care and nine days in the hospital, then missed three more weeks of school.

About a week after she went home, her parents noticed that she was drinking large amounts of water and urinating constantly. A pediatric endocrinologist ran a water deprivation test and diagnosed diabetes insipidus caused by the head trauma. The injury had damaged her pituitary gland, which no longer released the hormone that lets the kidneys hold water. The condition is permanent. She depends on a medication called DDAVP, taken twice a day through the nose, and without it she risks dehydration. The Kansas Court of Appeals noted that testimony described her as an otherwise normal, active child, and also that she was embarrassed to take the medicine in front of friends. On nights when her dosage needed adjusting she sometimes got up as many as seven times, and she slept after school to catch up.

The family sued Star Lumber in Sedgwick County District Court. Randall E. Fisher of Michaud, Hutton & Bradshaw in Wichita, the name the Hutton & Hutton firm used in that period, represented them. Foulston & Siefkin represented the store. The jury put 95 percent of the fault on Star Lumber and 5 percent on the girl's parents, and it set total damages at $761,211.38. That figure included $11,211.38 in past medical expenses and $600,000 in noneconomic loss, split between $350,000 to date and $250,000 for the future. The trial court entered judgment for the family at 95 percent of the total, $723,150.81, and denied the store's motion for a new trial or a reduction.

Star Lumber appealed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed in 1991. The Kansas Supreme Court then took the case. The store argued that an endocrinologist should not have been allowed to describe a very slight chance that the girl's pituitary injury could someday affect her sexual maturation, and that Fisher's closing argument had improperly pointed to the statutory limit on pain and suffering. The Supreme Court held that the testimony should not have been admitted and that the limiting instruction should not have been given, but found both errors harmless because the jury had awarded less for future noneconomic loss than the family asked for in closing. It also said the statutory cap on pain and suffering for an injury of this date is not something counsel may tell a jury about, but the store had never objected at trial, so the point was not properly before the court.

On July 10, 1992, the Supreme Court affirmed the judgment. The $723,150.81 award stood.